A Little Ray of Sunshine (10 page)

Involuntarily, I found myself smiling back. “So that’s how you do it, then? Just say ‘thank you’ and shut up about it? That’s the trick?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the trick.”

The waitress delivered our goods, and as Mom was squeezing the lemon into her water, a tall man in a gray suit passed by behind her, talking on a cell phone, and suddenly my entire body stiffened. I glanced up, trying to process consciously what my body seemed to know on instinct, and saw only the back of his head, his hair dark and well-tamed, so it couldn’t be... except...

“Emmy?” My mother’s voice was alarmed, but I couldn’t drag my eyes away from the café doors, through which the man had disappeared. My eyes were acclimated to the brightness outside, and I couldn’t see in, but still, I knew. I knew his voice. I’d
heard
him.

“Emmy? You look pale.” I pointed in the direction of the café. She glanced at it and then back at me. “What, sweetheart? Are you okay? Let me get you some water.”

She raised her hand to command a waitress and I leapt across the table to lower it.

“Don’t bring attention to us!” I hissed, sitting back down and flipping up the paper placemat to hide my face as though I was starring in some 1980s teen flick. “It’s Luke! He just passed behind you. At least, I think it was him. I don’t know. That guy was wearing a suit and his hair was all combed and...” I took in a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. Maybe it wasn’t him.”

But my mother’s face only confirmed my suspicions. “I’m not the only person who has changed, Emmy.”

I swallowed hard. “Oh, God. I think my throat is closing up. He’s probably ordering a cup of coffee or something and will be out in a minute and he’ll see you. He’ll see me. Oh, my God. Mom...” I met her eyes. “I’m not ready.”

She nodded, glanced around, and pointed. “Go. Sit with her.”

I turned and looked in the direction she had indicated. A woman sat by herself, reading a newspaper and sipping her coffee while nudging a baby stroller back and forth with her foot. I turned back to Mom and ducked lower behind the placemat.

“I don’t know her,” I said.

“Go. Introduce yourself. Sit down with your back to us and maybe Luke won’t know it’s you. Your hair is longer, and Digs told us all you weren’t coming, so...” She glanced at the café door and her eyes widened. “Go! Go now!”

I shot up from our table and knelt-walked to the woman with the baby stroller, who froze mid sip and stared up at me.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is EJ and this is very complicated, but there’s a man I need to avoid and... can I sit here? Just for a minute?”

She shrugged and nodded. I took a seat and leaned forward, talking in a light whisper. “So, behind me, the woman I was just sitting with... is anyone talking to her?”

She glanced up, then looked back at me. “Yes. She’s talking to a tall man in a gray suit.”

My heart started pounding. I looked down at the baby, who smiled back up at me with a fat-faced, toothless grin. “He’s cute. What’s his name?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Oh.” I smiled down at the baby. “Sorry, Elizabeth.” I glanced up at the mom. “Are they still talking?”

The woman shifted to look past me, then nodded. “Yep.”

I leaned forward and whispered, “Is he looking this way? Do you think I could look without him seeing me?”

She leaned forward as well. “Is he, like, stalking you or something? Because I’ve got a cell phone. We can call the police if you’d like.”

I sat back. “No. It’s nothing like that.” I motioned to her watch. “That’s pretty.”

“Thanks.” She glanced up, then looked back at me. “I think it’s safe. Go ahead. Look.”

And, despite the fact that I knew it was possibly the stupidest thing I could have done, I looked.

And time stopped. It was like those scenes in the movies, the highly improbable ones where all sound and movement slows, and the only thing in focus is the man the heroine loves. And there he was. It was Luke. His hair was cut short and neatly combed down instead of unkempt and curling at the edges; his suit was expensive and neatly lined, unlike the wrinkled jeans and flannel he used to wear; and his smile was tight instead of wide and unrestrained, but it was still Luke, and it still took my breath away just to look at him.

That wasn’t good.

Mom chattered on about something, motioning to my bags and making like they were hers, and Luke listened politely. Then he bent down to kiss her on the cheek, pulled out his cell phone, and headed down the street. I watched him go, grabbing on to the familiarity of his gait as he walked away—at least something was still the same—then turned to the mom and baby who had hosted my psychotic episode.

“Thank you,” I said, pushing up from the table. “I know that was weird.”

“Seen weirder,” she said with a light smile, then lifted her coffee in one hand and her newspaper in the other. I walked over to sit down across from my mother.

“Thank you,” I said.

She smiled at me. “You’re welcome.” Her smile faded. “You know you’re going to have to deal with him sooner or later, though, right? I mean, he’s going to be your stepbrother soon.”

“Oh, God, Mom!” I said. “Gross! Besides, the whole stepbrother thing doesn’t count with adults. You’ve been married so much that if it did, I’d be technically related to half the male population in America and most of Western Europe. I’d have to go to Botswana to find a husband.”

I didn’t notice the tension in her silence until I looked up from my mocha. “What?”

“I like that...” She motioned vaguely in my direction. “Design on your shirt.”

I glanced down. It was a brown t-shirt that I’d accidentally thrown in with the whites, and what had resulted from the bleach were weird orange streaks throughout. I glanced up. “You’re serious?”

Her left eyebrow arched with expectation. I swallowed hard and said, “Thank you. I like your earrings. Simple studs are very elegant.”

“Thank you.”

I took a sip of my mocha and she, for some reason I couldn’t understand, started mixing her water with her spoon. After a few minutes, I nodded to her glass.

“Good water, huh?”

“Yes,” she said. “They serve very good water here.”

And with that, I think we both knew it was shaping up to be a very long day.

***

When Emmy was little, she used to draw a lot. Cartoon faces; she called them her Eggheads. She’d draw an egg-shaped oval, and then somehow be able to get almost any likeness into them, with nothing more than a few squiggles here and there and some color. It was really quite amazing. I remember one Christmas when she was, I don’t know, maybe ten, and she’d decorated the house with the Eggheads. Everywhere I went I saw family, friends, famous faces, and some that I guessed were schoolmates of hers. I remember she asked me what I thought of them, and I told her that I loved them, and I was so happy she was going to grow up to be an artist just like me.

I never saw another one after that, and by the time she was let out of her boarding school for Easter break, she’d decided she wanted to be a doctor or some such nonsense. I was always very sad about that. I liked the idea of having something in common with my daughter.

—from Twinkie and Me: The Real Life Confessions of Lilly Lorraine

Eight

We were fifteen minutes into Bringing Up Baby when my mother lifted the remote control and shut the movie off.

“Hey,” I said, shifting forward on the den couch to set my bowl of popcorn on the coffee table. “I thought we were bonding.”

“We’re not bonding,” she said. “We’re just sitting here in silence.”

“Well... yeah. ‘Cuz... the movie.”

She shook her head. “It’s not working. I think we need to talk.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk, then.”

“All right,” she said, turning toward me on the couch. “We have a lot of issues between us. You’re angry with me for maybe not being the most attentive mother in the world...”

“Wow, way to spin it, Stephanopoulos.”

“...and I’m very upset with you for disappearing off the face of the planet for six years without ever bothering to let us know you weren’t dead in a ditch somewhere.”

I shot her a dark look. She cleared her throat.

“But I think we can both agree that it would take much more time than we have at the moment to resolve all of that. So, I was thinking, maybe, we should both just forgive each other.”

I stared at her, wide-eyed. “But didn’t you say this morning that you weren’t going to apologize? You don’t seem to think that you did anything wrong, so what’s there to forgive?”

She shook her head. “No, that’s not what I said. What I said was that there wasn’t enough
time
for me to apologize for everything—”

“Do you think you even did anything wrong?” I asked, crossing my arms over my stomach.

She paused. “I think I did the best I could. And I think I’m tired of feeling badly about it.”

“When? When have you felt bad?”

“The last five years—”

“I wasn’t here for that, remember? I saw none of this alleged contrition. All I get is this perky, happy, healthy little pixie where my mother used to be. Meanwhile, my head is still full of your wreckage, and I’m supposed to just... what? Forgive and forget to make it easy for you?”

She pushed herself up from the couch and started picking up the sodas and popcorn. “What do you want? Do you want me to have a T-shirt made, with big letters saying
I Was A Bad Mother
? Wear it around town? Or maybe I should just nail myself to a cross, wander down the streets of Hollywood? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Emmy.”

“You can start by not calling me Emmy,” I said, following her as she brought the untouched snacks back into the kitchen. “It’s EJ.”

“Honestly, I don’t understand that at all,” she said, dumping the popcorn into the trash. “Emmy is such a pretty name.”

“Emmy is an award. Emmy represents everything you wanted in your life that you never got, and it’s infuriating that even my name isn’t about me.”

“Oh, not this again.” She pulled open the refrigerator and put the sodas back. “Honestly, your obsession with—”

“
My
obsession?” I laughed bitterly. “
My
obsession! Are you kidding me? Let’s go rent the first season of
Coach
, Mom, what do you say? Then maybe we can talk about obsessions.”

She slammed the refrigerator door shut. “That was a terrible show! A
terrible
show and she was terrible in it, I don’t care how many nominations she got!”

I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Jess and Digs standing at the edge of the hallway, staring at us. Jess turned to Digs.

“Did we come back too early?”

Digs grinned and stepped into the kitchen. “I’d say we’re just in time.”

Jess grabbed for his sleeve, but missed. “But didn’t you say there was a... thingy... museum in town? I really was interested in the... oh, shoot. Was it trains?”

Digs patted my mother on the back. “Hey, do I smell popcorn?”

“It’s in the garbage,” I said. “Apparently, the key to mental health is making food you never eat. Who knew? It’s gonna revolutionize the psychiatric industry.”

“Oh, that’s it!” My mother reached for the wood knife block on the counter and withdrew a chef’s knife.

Jess stepped into the room, holding her hands up.

“Um, maybe you two should take a break from each other?”

Mom twirled on her heel and threw open the refrigerator door. I smiled at Jess.

“We can’t take a break. We’re joined at the hip. The bright side is that if she kills me, then she has to be buried alive with me. So I can at least get in that one last dig.”

Muttering to herself, my mother withdrew a block of cheese, slapped it down on the counter, cut off a chunk and took a bite.

“There! I eat! Do you see!
Cheese
, even!” She tossed the chef’s knife into the sink, and Jess shuffled over next to me and put her hand on my arm.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked carefully.

“No, no,” I said, patting her hand, “let Digs take you to the thingy museum.”

“The thingy museum it is,” he said, putting one arm around Jess’s shoulders and guiding her back out. “Or we could get a burger.”

“Burgers are good,” Jess said, shooting me one last wary look before disappearing down the hallway with Digs. I turned my attention back to my mother, who was breathing in and out, through the nose, out the mouth, with her eyes closed.

“You okay?” I asked.

She opened her eyes. “I’ll be right back. I have to go to the bathroom.”

“You’re not going to purge that cheese, are you?” I said. “Because if you are, then maybe I should call Dr. Travers.”

“Oh!” She threw her hands up in the air and let them slap down against the kitchen counter. “Why do you have to be so hateful?”

“I don’t know!” I shouted, then took a breath to calm myself down. “I don’t know. But this whole thing, this trying to mend the relationship between us, it’s ridiculous, Mom. It’s not going to happen. You can’t fix thirty years in seven days, it just can’t be done. I don’t see why we can’t just avoid each other as much as possible and let it go at that.”

She slumped against the counter and stared at the floor. “Because you’re my daughter, and I love you. And I’m trying so hard but I can’t go back in time and nothing I can do now is going to make a difference and... there’s just nothing I can do.”

“You can say you’re sorry,” I said.

She looked up, her eyes red-rimmed and tired. “Dr. Travers said—”

“I don’t care what Dr. Travers said.” I clenched my teeth until I got myself under control, and then looked up to meet her eyes. “I already knew it, you know.”

She shook her head, her expression blank. She had no idea what I was talking about, which meant I had to elaborate. I swallowed hard and kept going.

“I knew I wasn’t good enough for Luke. I had no idea how to be a good wife, and I sure as hell didn’t know why he wanted me to try. You didn’t plant anything in my head that wasn’t already there.” The memories of everything that had happened back then took their shot at me, and I had to breathe for a minute before I could go on. “But you should have thought I was good enough for him even if I wasn’t. If there was only one person in the whole world who believed I was worth something, it should have been you. So if you didn’t mean those things you said, if you’re sorry, then a real good start would be for you to tell me that.”

There was a long silence, and when I looked up she was staring at her shoes. I huffed and threw my arms up in the air. “I don’t believe this.”

“I just... I can’t say I’m sorry because—”

“Because Dr. Travers said not to,” I interrupted, the snotty tone in my voice so strong even I cringed from it.

“No, it’s because...” She paused, shook her head. “If all it took to ruin everything was one phone call from me, then it wasn’t going to work anyway. And, honey, take it from someone who’s been there—a divorce takes a part of your soul away with it. I know I’ve been married a lot, and divorced a lot, and it may not seem like a big deal to someone watching, but...” She breathed in deep, let out a long exhale. “If I saved you from that, then I can’t be sorry. As to whether I meant it or not, well... I thought I did at the time, but honey, you have to know that most of what people say to you has more to do with them than it does with you. I mean, obviously—”

“No,” I said sharply. “Not
obviously
. You don’t get to skate out of this on an
obviously
.” I stared at her for a while, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Now might be a good time for that bathroom visit, Mom.”

She released a breath. “Will you be here when I get back?”

I rested my hands on the edge of the granite breakfast bar I had watched Danny install during one of the many summers I’d spent there, and stared down at the stone floor I’d helped him pick out. “I’m doing this for Danny. So... yes.”

She nodded and headed off down the hallway. I closed my eyes and did her trick, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. Took a few tries, but eventually it worked. Then I ducked around the breakfast bar, opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of chardonnay, yanked the cork out with my teeth, spit it toward the sink and missed. When my mother returned from the bathroom, she sighed.

“Oh, Emmy,” she said, her voice laced with disappointment. “Drinking from the bottle?”

“Get your own,” I grumbled, and lifted the bottle to my lips.

She watched me for a while, then shoved me gently away from the refrigerator.

“Out of the way,” she said. “I know there’s some Pinot Grigio in here somewhere.”

***

There’s a reason why wine has been such a popular drink for so long. It’s good, powerful stuff. I’m not a big proponent of drinking your problems away, but I have to tell you, once the wine entered the picture, being joined at the hip with my mother became a much, much more pleasant experience. We’d both been so emotionally rung out by the time we resorted to the wine that we just got silly. We made a platter of cheese and crackers and went into the den to watch the rest of
Bringing Up Baby
. We raided the wine cellar twice, and used the freezer to chill the bottles we brought back up for speed’s sake, although we shared those bottles in a civilized manner, using glasses and everything, while we watched
Arsenic and Old Lace
. By the time Danny got home from work, we were out on the back deck, singing everything from Motown to ‘80s pop at the top of our lungs. We did Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted” particularly well, as I recall.

Of course, I’m not a reliable narrator for this part. I was pretty drunk, and the night is a bit of a blur. To hear Danny tell it, Mom and I were quite a sight, out on the back deck howling like alley dogs at the sky. (His words, not mine.) I do remember coming in from the deck once it had gotten dark, Mom and me giggling like a couple of teenagers coming in after curfew, to find Digs, Jess and Danny in the den, eating pizza and watching baseball.

“Ohhhh,” Mom said as she slid the glass door shut behind us, our most recently emptied bottle clutched in the fist of her left hand. “Did I forget dinner? Emmy, we forgot dinner.”

“Whatchoo mean ‘we’?” I said. “I don’t cook.”

For some reason, we both found this insanely funny. I don’t remember the expressions Digs, Jess and Danny were wearing at the time, but in my booze-addled memory, they thought we were funny, too.

“Why don’t you girls go on up to bed?” Danny said. “We’re all fine here.”

“Jess.” I sat down on the arm of the couch next to her. “I’m so sorry. I have been a horrible hostess.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I’ve had a lot of fun.”

“Oh, really?” I looked up at Digs, who simply smiled back. “How was the thingy museum?”

“We actually didn’t make it to the thingy museum,” Digs said, and he shot a sideways look at Jess.

“Oh, my God, Digs! Did you hit on my angel?” I turned to Jess. “I should have warned you. He’s got a thing for blondes.”

“Stop!” Jess said, slapping my arm and laughing. “We went out for burgers and we talked. That’s all.”

“I smell a budding romance,” Mom singsonged, standing behind the couch and patting Jess’s hair. “You’d better lay off the burgers and pizza, sweetheart, or you’ll risk losing his interest.”

Annnnnnnnd... the room went silent as classic Lilly Lorraine showed her true face. Digs shot Mom a hard look and Danny shook his head, smiling ruefully down at his shoes. Jess, in an act of warmth and generosity, smiled up at my mother and grabbed her hand, giving it an affectionate squeeze.

“Actually,” she said, “I was just about to ask if you had any ice cream.”

The tension broke and everyone laughed and I leaned down and nudged Jess on the shoulder.

“I bet I make a lot more sense to you now,” I said in low tones, then sat up and pushed up off the arm of the couch. “Okay, I’m putting Lilly to bed. Then I’m coming back down and kicking all y’all’s asses at Monopoly.”

I grabbed my mother’s arm and led her out, and could hear Jess ask, “Is she really coming back?” to which Digs answered, “I hope not. She’s a fucking shark at Monopoly.”